Scripture: |
Jeremiah 31:31-34 |
Day after day after day after day after day. “One season following another, laden with happiness and tears” as Tevye sings in “Fiddler On the Roof”. We go to sleep and we wake up – and here’s another opportunity to serve our Lord. But, oh, it can seem so wearying at times. Day after day after day. And all we ask is to be enlisted -- enabled – empowered – to do three things: to see you more clearly, to love you more dearly, to follow you more nearly. It’s redolent, isn’t it, of that verse from Micah 6:8: “…and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Day by day. That’s 27,394 days in the 75 years of First Congregational Church (assuming I’ve counted the leap days accurately), 2,922 for Northwest Community Church, 2,557 for Congregational Christian Church of American Samoa. That is a whole lot of days to keep on doing the Lord’s work. And when we do get weary sometimes we just need to know that there is another day a-comin’. It’s simply a matter of keeping on keeping on.
Those of us at First Congregational began our Lenten journey by looking at covenant – specifically, God’s covenant with Noah that brings with it both demands and promises, a covenant that is offered to us in the sign of the rainbow. Now here at the end of Lent, as we begin to prepare our hearts and minds and spiritual sensitivities for the events of Holy Week climaxing with the glory of Easter, we are presented, courtesy of Jeremiah, with a new covenant – a covenant written in our hearts with the clear promise: “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” I like the way Presbyterian Susan Andrews puts this: “A new heart is God’s covenant translated from rules into relationship. It is written not on stone but on the soft tissue of human potential…a painful, indelible etching that marks us for life and transforms us into suffering servants.” God’s new covenant is written deep inside us – on our hearts – in our souls – never to be eradicated no matter how weary we may get of keeping on keeping on.
God is promising to be in relationship with the people -- like God's promises to Noah, to Abraham and Sarah, and to Moses and the people at Sinai -- God promises to be a presence with the people, abiding with them, and even promising that they will belong to each other. We Christians have a tendency to contrast the God of the Hebrew Scriptures with that of the New Testament – the former being seen as harsh and punishing and angry, and the latter as the kinder, gentler God of grace and the promise. But here in Jeremiah we see God’s great love and compassion for the people, Israel. And we know that that love and compassion extend all the way down to us. Even us.
And so we turn again to God, the God of both Testaments, the God of the past and the future, with our weariness, our homesickness and loneliness, our hunger for justice for a suffering world, our partial vision and our sometimes forlorn hope, the very fabric of our hearts torn open, and we listen for that Stillspeaking God to address us with words of comfort and consolation, words of rescue and release, words of restoration and homecoming. And the words are there: “for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
We are in covenant with our God – a covenant that we have kept in this place now for 75 years. "Covenant" has been described as something that each party enters for the sake of the other -- for the sake of the other. We know that's true of God, but is it true of us? Parker Palmer says that the "true covenant means the acceptance of weighty obligations to a Lord who demands that we 'do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.'" Accepting this true covenant, he says, would "serve as a channel of reconciliation in a world in love with divisions.... The church would proclaim not its mastery over the world but its servanthood -- to God, to humankind, and to the vision of a peaceable kingdom." We are now being called to fulfill that covenant – for the next 75 years and beyond.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
March 29, 2009